


Rainy Days and Mondays

by dreamyafterdark



Series: Kylux Adjacents [4]
Category: Ex Machina (2015), Law & Order: SVU, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Awkward Flirting, CCTV, Cat Cafés, Easy Listening music to despair to, Hacking, Hoodies, Kylux - Freeform, Kylux Adjacents, M/M, Shyness, Stalking, Surveillance, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-11-02 00:14:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20556428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamyafterdark/pseuds/dreamyafterdark
Summary: Left behind to die alone in Nathan's isolated, locked-down home, Caleb wakes up to Nathan's jukebox playing a Carpenters' song on a loop over the speakers. He soon realises he is not entirely alone: Someone else is present - in the security system.





	Rainy Days and Mondays

Pointless.

It was pointless.

Caleb sank down the smooth wall, desperate tears drying on his cheeks, his limbs weak, just collapsing in a heap.  
He would die here.  
Slowly die of thirst and hunger, slowly go insane. If he didn’t kill himself first. Caleb gave a dry sob, that ached in his chest. Too much. His head burned. His light-coloured lashes lowered, blue eyes closed. 

The facility was sealed. No hidden exits. Nathan had made sure of that, Ava had been thorough. This corridor led nowhere else than a few locked doors. And the glass was unbreakable..

Ugh. Caleb squeezed his eyes into darkness, and groaned. He had fallen asleep in an awkward position, and his head hurt like mad. And now there was music… Nathan’s jukebox. It had to be 2 am. This corridor was close to the entertainment room, and the jukebox had speakers in this and the next corridor over. Caleb blinked as his movement brought the lights back on. Dimmed softly, they bathed the corridor in a honey glaze, while the rest of the facility was dark… almost beautiful. No, it was. It was beautiful. Just ironic. Caleb winced, as his stomach made its protest known, and his throat felt parched. So it begins? He smacked his lips together, tried to mobilise some saliva in his mouth, when he noticed that… the same song… was playing. Oh hell, no… What was this, a bug? Or a “feature”? Nathan had had a strange sense of humour after all. Well. Now Nathan was lying in a pool of his own blood, somewhere outside of this door, covered in darkness for the time being. Caleb snorted a wry laugh. Nice work, Nathan. Dying to the Carpenter’s “Rainy Days and Mondays” was… well, it was something or other. Probably an expletive of some sort, the kind that’s funnier when bleeped out. Funny… Ah…

He could watch something funny.

If he had had his phone on him. If the Wi-fi had still worked.

Wait, why shouldn’t it? And… perhaps there was a panel of some sort, perhaps there was still a way to contact- the corridor fell into darkness. Caleb huffed and moved his arms around, but it stayed dark. No. No, it couldn’t be, what was this, a power failure?

Well, no, the song kept playing. Easy Listening for the end of time. Caleb dragged himself to his feet, and flailed his arms around.

“Hey! Hey!! Come back on, you fucker!!!”

“Alright, alright, I’m on it….”

Caleb froze. A voice. There was another voice, a man, 20s, 30s, someone else in the facility?

“Who… who are you?”

No answer.  
Of course.

A hallucination. He was losing it. He was already losing it after only a few hours… - a whirring noise, and the lights came back on. Caleb stared at his reflection in the glass. Slowly walked towards it. Hit his fist against the glass, hard. 

Nothing.  
Of course.

“A bit violent, aren’t you…”

This time, Caleb didn’t even turn around.

“Aren’t you meant to reply? What kind of hallucination are you if you can’t respond to anything?”

But there was no other reflection beside his. And no response. Only a long pause, and then a quite unrelated laugh.

“You must really like this song, huh? It’s so easy to undo the loop... But you’re probably just lying in a corner, drunk out of your mind again, hm?...”

Caleb frowned. He took a step back from the glass, and lifted his head to the ceiling.  
“Can you hear me?”, he said clearly, loudly. Then he screamed it.

Nothing.

It would have been easy to believe that he was going mad, but the way this voice spoke… it seemed rational. And really, Caleb had no other reason to hope for anything, so he sat down against the wall and waited, periodically moving his arm to turn the lights back on after they switched off…

“Gotcha!! Installed some extra code this morning, huh? Well, Nathan, you lose, I win. I have visual…”

That made Caleb snort a laugh. What was this guy, a hacker? Where was he? What was he seeing?... Suddenly, Caleb saw lights go on in other parts of the facility, and then the voice returned… 

“Jesus… fucking Christ, what happened to you?... Nathan, what happened to you, man, you’re… you’re dead. All of you are dead…”  
“Not all of us.”, Caleb noted dryly, then suddenly felt a cold flash in his chest. What if this guy just logged off in fright, and never found him? 

He stood up again, waved his arms around, jumping up and down.

“Hey! Hey, I’m alive! I’m in here! Damnit, I’m in here!!!”

Caleb’s shoulders slumped down. It was no use. But then… was he imagining it? The lights went off, and he flicked his hand to bring them back up, and – yes. A camera, one of Nathan’s security cameras had turned, was facing him.

Watching him.

Seeing him.

After all this time desperately trying to catch the attention of a void. What now? What do you say as the first words? What do you do?  
Caleb stood and stared for a moment, just him and the camera, and whoever was behind it. Then he slowly, hesitantly lifted his hand and… waved.

“Wow…”, the voice whispered, clearly to itself.  
“Hello…. I can hear you, you know… my name is Caleb Smith. I’m locked in here. Can you get me out? Can you alert someone?!”  
“I can’t hear you… This security system, it’s only visual. But for some reason, it seems you can hear me?”

For a moment, Caleb’s face froze in shock and disappointment, but then he pulled himself together and nodded, placing one hand behind his earlobe to try to mime the word ‘hearing’. When no immediate answer came, he pointed to himself, and shaped his hand in a mirrored C, then an A with fingers from both hands, an L, and E, and… how to do the B…

“Cale? Caleb? That’s your name?”

Caleb nodded, his blue eyes briefly flashing with something like happiness. 

“I’m… Jason. I’m Jason. Nice to meet you, Caleb.”

Another nod. It made sense that the guy was hesitant, he was a hacker after all, and this… this was no mean feat. He’d hacked into Nathan’s security system, despite Ava’s updates… Caleb shook himself out of his thoughts. Did Jason realise he needed to rescue Caleb? That he wasn’t just hanging out here for fun? He gestured towards the door with an urgent look on his face.

“Ah yeah. Yeah. Nathan is through there. He’s dead, I’m afraid. You don’t happen to know anything about that, do you…?”

What the actual hell? But as Caleb frowned and nodded at the camera, it suddenly dawned on him that Jason might think he had something to do with it. He tried to mime that he didn’t, but figured it probably didn’t look believable.

“You’re trapped in the red sector.”, Jason continued, changing the subject.  
“And your air is going to run out in about two hours. Ventilation system’s been taken offline.”

Hands ruffled through blonde hair in exasperation.

“Ava, you fucking BITCH!!”, Caleb shouted.  
“Yeah, I can’t hear you, but you look mad. I would be, too. Your exits are blocked… although…”

Caleb had begun to walk in irate circles, but he stopped when Jason’s voice changed. Looking up at the camera, he listened to… a frankly insane plan. 

Insanely irritating, and utterly plausible.

Fuck you, Nathan.

“When I say Go, you’ve got 10 seconds. Run, you run and don’t look back. That door will close whether you are in its way or not. It’s timed to catch you, so… really, run.”  
Caleb pressed his lips together, trying to focus over the blinking red lights and the siren noise. The music was still playing, and above it all, Jason’s voice had explained the “rules”. Nathan had set trigger points, that closed doors when intruders passed them. By activating the intruder alarm, Jason had been able to change the door states to open, each ready to close when Caleb passed the corresponding trigger point. 

So all he had to do was outrun each one. Easy. Especially as he had only one chance to get each of them right. Only one chance… He could do this. Despite a typical sedentary lifestyle as a coder, the one sport Caleb did was running. He could jog, but what he was really good was sprinting. He could do this. And adrenaline would help…

“Go!”

Caleb ran. The door tried to close on him, but he cleared it. He cleared it! He was out of that cell, even if he had run into a new one… He took a deep breath, felt light-headed. 

And he cleared the next, too. And the one after that. This was a new area now, the walls looked different, and Caleb started to feel cautiously hopeful. This could actually work… He looked up to show a thumbs up to Jason, but there was no camera pointing at him in this corridor, nowhere to nod to. 

“Caleb? Can you still hear me? I can’t see you. But, if you keep the same speed up, I can still tell you when to go. I can see the route you clear, and I can approximate.”

Approximate… that wasn’t great. And if Caleb was honest, the last door had been a bit too close a call already. They couldn’t really be getting harder, like a video game. Could they?

Ah, fuck, of course they could. Nathan’s idea of a joke.

“I really hope you can hear me…”

Caleb moved backwards then forwards a few times, to try and indicate with a weird pattern that he did hear Jason. Not the best communication device, but he heard the other guy chuckle.

“Right, either you can hear me, or you’ve gone insane…”

It was a nice laugh, actually. The hacker had a nice voice…

“Go!”

Caleb ran with everything his legs would give, and made it through the door just in the nick of time.

“Yes!! Fuck yes, you did it! You did it, Caleb! One more like this, and you’re in the belly of the beast! Central controlling unit. Open heart surgery. We’ll fix this house up, we’ll get you out of there. I’ll get you out of there.”

Yes.

Jason had a nice voice. The innocent glee on it was nothing short of beautiful. And although Caleb’s legs were starting to complain, he was confident they had one good sprint in them, still. Just one.

Jason shouted the signal. He said “Go!”, followed by “baby!”, quietly, but amongst all the alarm bleeps, and the music, and the adrenaline in Caleb’s ears he heard it. He heard it and it made him smile. And then he was in the next room, and he had made it, and his left foot was just a split second behind him and-

The scream that tore from Caleb’s chest was followed by a series of roared out swear words. The door had caught his leg, broken it, trapped him. The lights in the room flickered on, and the main control console was right there, ten meters in front of him and out of reach.

Fuck.

FUCK!!!

“Oh God…. This is not how I wanted to see you when I got to see you again…”

It wasn’t so much a laugh as a coughed out, sharp exhale that came from Caleb, but the camera saw it. Jason saw it… 

“Oh man… you know, I wish I knew what your voice sounded like. I mean, right now, I’m sure it’s rough. But before… before all this…”

Caleb should have been irritated at Jason’s babbling, but somehow it was actually soothing. The pain was horrific, and he felt nauseous from it, but as Jason softly talked over the sound system, Caleb stabilised his breath.  
And when he turned his head, he suddenly spotted something. Pointing behind him with one hand, he waved up to the camera with his other.

“Yeah? Pull it out, so I can see properly. Yeah… Oh yeah, can you activate her? If you can bring her online, maybe I can pick her up with a scan and communicate… give her some instruct- here we go!”

Caleb had pulled a droid from the corner of the room. One part of her body was skeletal, but the other looked normal. He had worried that she wasn’t functional, but when he pressed her hand, she switched on. Caleb couldn’t help flinching, memories of Ava all too fresh. But this droid’s eyes were blank, and she showed no signs of higher activity.

“Yeah, she’s got basic coding, but nothing more. You can’t really talk to her, but she’s easier to hack for me…”, Jason stated, something like excitement slowly rising in his voice.  
But then he fell silent as he worked, and Caleb was left alone to try and distract himself from the pain. It wasn’t going too well, but when Jason was in control of the droid, the first thing he got her to do was not go to the console, but make a beeline for the cabinets.

“What are you doing?”, Caleb mouthed and gestured at the camera, until the droid returned with a box of pills.  
“I can see through her eyes. Looks like pretty strong stuff to me. Might help.”, the droid said in Jason’s voice, and shrugged her shoulders.

Caleb coughed a dry laugh,

“Ah come on, it made you laugh. That’s a success!”

The pills did work, and fast. Perhaps this was also because they were taken on a very empty stomach, but Caleb felt a little dazed as he watched Jason direct the droid on the console. Occasional swearing interrupted what sounded like… yes he was definitely humming.

“Can’t change the damn song, eh..”, Caleb shook his head.  
“I could…”, Jason replied.

Suddenly Caleb realised that he had answered him earlier, too.

“You… can hear me?!!! You can hear me!”  
“She can hear you, yes. Oh, I’m sorry, I got so caught up in trying to rescue you… Ah shit, that sounded defensive, I’m sorry…”

Caleb’s eyes were wide, watching the droid speak in Jason’s voice, and pat at her fact awkwardly.

“It’s alright. Just keep going. I… I’ve never worked on the mainframe in here, and without a terminal I couldn’t help you even if my head wasn’t clouded over with pills and pain and… yeah.”

The droid turned her head and looked at him with deep, mechanical eyes, that he knew hid a real person. A real person however far away in reality…

“Where are you actually?”  
“When we get out of here, I’m taking you out for a drink.”, Jason said, ignoring Caleb’s question.

“I’m going to take you out for a beer, and steak and French fries. And every day that passes, this is just going to be a bad memory, man, and then a strange one, and then, probably a funny one. Dark. But probably funny….”

The droid’s face turned back to the workstation and Caleb sat and watched.

“I’d like that…”, he said, very quietly and very late.

When Caleb woke up, the red flashing lights were switched out with something blue. And the sirens had turned into the sound of helicopter blades chopping the air around them.

“Wh-where is Jason?”, he muttered, dazed.  
“Subject is awake, disorientated. Blood-pressure low.”

Someone shone a light into his eyes. Caleb squeezed them shut, shook his head.

“What’s going on?”  
“You are safe now.”, a man said slowly and clearly.

Caleb frowned. He was being moved, he was on.. a stretcher. The chopper noise became louder, then changed character has he was loaded into the helicopter. Left behind, standing in the grass was the droid, just watching.

“Hey. Take her?”  
“The machine? Well, she may have gotten you out of there, Sir, but she was non-responsive when we arrived. Anyway, I’m sure someone can extract her memory card or something. She’s just a machine, Sir.”

Caleb wasn’t sure how to respond to that. But as the helicopter door closed, he saw the droid lift her hand. Hesitantly… and then wave.

“Good bye Jason…”, Caleb whispered.

Blue Book had offered a generous compensation scheme. Very generous. And that was after paying for Caleb’s medical expenses, including a psychologist for, basically, the rest of his life if he chose so. He woke up to find his mortgage paid, and three new, and well-filled, bank accounts. One labelled “Retirement Fund”, and the other “Education”, the third “Travel”. In a short, perfectly polite letter, lawyers expressed the board’s wishes that Caleb change careers, go work with something he had “always wanted to pursue” – preferably far away from here. 

Basically stay the hell away from tech, former co-workers and the papers. And he’d chuckled to himself. Coding was something he enjoyed, but it was true, it also creeped him out somewhat after seeing where it could lead him…

A change of scenery might do him good, yes. Perhaps, the East Coast? Perhaps… yes he’d always wondered what New York would be like. 

And he did have other interests, yes.  
Music.  
History.  
Writing… 

Fiction, writing fiction. The Lawyers could breathe easily. No memoirs, not yet anyway…

Sitting in a cat café, Caleb spent hours writing in the fine company of purring felines and coffee. One day he’d have to get a couple of cats of his own, he thought as he buried his hand in the soft fur of a large, pitch-black tomcat.

Caleb was so absorbed in his writing, he didn’t notice the little flashing light on his phone until he picked it up to check his calendar.

[Come for those beers and that steak dinner I owe you, have you?]

He looked around, but saw no one stand out in the café at all. It was raining outside, typical New York weather, and there was certainly no one standing at the windows, staring at him. Almost instinctually, Caleb looked up, scanned the ceiling and corners, but the only security camera pointed someplace else than him.

[Relax. We don’t have to do that anymore. We cleared that place, remember? You cleared it.]  
[Where are you? Jason, right?]  
[Yeah :) who else?]

Caleb looked around, but couldn’t see anyone on their phone. Although… no, that was just a guy working away at his computer, he wasn’t… was he...

[Come over here? I want to see you.]

No answer.

[If anything, it’s me that owes you beer. And more than that…]

Ugh. Caleb cringed after hitting Send. That sounded… suggestive.

But it worked, apparently.

[You don’t owe me anything, Caleb.]  
[But I’m glad we did it. That was epic…]

Caleb wasn’t sure, but the image of the droid slowly waving goodbye jumped into his mind again, and as he glanced up, the guy closed his computer up and got up to leave.  
“Wait… Please…”

When Caleb wrapped his hands around the other man’s wrist, his heart was pounding in his ears, and although he’d never met Jason, and couldn’t possibly know, suddenly it was very clear.

“You’re Jason. Your… scent. It’s you.”

The man turned his head, and deep, dark eyes looked at Caleb, soft, a little sad, like a puppy’s. No judgment on Caleb's strange words. None at all.

“Why, do you smell the fear on me?”  
“Excitement. It’s not being afraid, it’s being excited…”, Caleb loosely quoted his therapist, then smirked, suddenly realising that soon after his return, his phone had started to have a strange bug: the camera seemed to always be on…

“But then, you know that…”, he said with a wry smile.

Jason shrugged. “Gotta make sure you’re safe. It’s a crazy world out there.”

Caleb just smiled. No judgment on Jason's strange behaviour. None at all..

It took Jason a few attempts, but he got it. The security footage from the cat café that showed their first meeting. The moment Caleb had taken his wrist, and a minute later, grabbed him and pushed his head against his chest, literally moved his hoodie around him so that he was enclosed in it as well as Jason’s arms. 

It didn’t show their first kiss.  
It didn’t show the first time Caleb’s hand found Jason’s and held it so lightly, but so tenaciously.  
It didn’t show their first time in bed together, just sleeping next to each other in Caleb’s flat, and from that night on, every night, as neither felt quite right alone anymore.

Long before they had sex. Long before, at least a week or so.

No, it didn’t show any of that, nor did it show Jason gradually moving more and more into Caleb’s flat and his life, until they were basically an item til death would them part.  
It showed a slender, blonde man in a blue hoodie tentatively move up to a tall, dark-haired one in a black hoodie. It showed his hand reach out for the other man’s, and stop him from running away once again. It showed a slender, sweet man seeing him. Really seeing him.

Their shared past. Their potential, of a shared future, where neither had to hide.

And if there had been sound, it would have picked up that the Carpenters were playing. Caleb maintained that Jason hacked the stereo, but he never.

He never…

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fic originally meant for Kylux Adjacent Month, but several months later, here it is :) hope you like it.
> 
> Oh, and I actually like the Carpenters, but their music is used as ironic backdrop in this fic, as well as for more actual twee cuteness later,


End file.
